Astral Point Communications Announces Appointments of Wu-Fu Chen and Per Suneby to Board of Directors.

CHELMSFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 18, 1999--

Wu-Fu Chen, Chairman of the Board, Shasta Networks and founder of Cascade Communications and Per Suneby, CEO of Indus River Networks, have been appointed to the Astral Point Board of Directors. Each brings unique, individual talents that add a wealth of network industry experience to optical networking start-up, Astral Point.

Chen has started and grown eight communications companies, including Cascade Communications where he was a founder and vice president of engineering. While there, he guided Cascade through its IPO in 1994 and through the company's peak of more than $10 billion in capitalization. Most recently, he was a vice president at Cisco Systems (NASDAQ:CSCO) where he led Cisco's integrated voice, data, and video access product development. Previously, Chen was chairman and CEO of leading edge start-ups Ardent Communications and Arris Networks--which were acquired by Cisco and Ascend Communications (NASDAQ:ASND) respectively.

Per Suneby is co-founder and CEO of Indus River Networks. He has extensive general management, marketing, and business development experience in the information technology and communications arena, most recently with Motorola's Information Systems Group (NYSE:MOT) where he managed Motorola's industry-leading cable data modem business. After 3 years with GE Information Services and 12 years with Motorola, Suneby is experienced in managing rapid growth, evaluating and launching new businesses, driving international expansion, and using multi-channel distribution. A native of Sweden and a Canadian citizen, he studied electrical engineering at the University of British Columbia and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.

"As the bandwidth requirements continue to grow, cost-effective bandwidth distribution in metropolitan fiber networks is becoming an unfulfilled need," said Chen, who joins the board after investigating many optical start-ups. "Astral Point is addressing this need through highly integrated DWDM systems. I was very impressed by the Astral Point team and the progress they have made over such a short period of time."

"This is a time of disruptive change in the Internet and enterprise network infrastructure and applications," added Suneby. "Being involved with advanced VPN networking solutions in my own start-up, I foresee a rapid evolution to high bandwidth IP-over-DWDM services that come closer and closer to the edge of the enterprise. Eventually, you'll see large users dynamically managing wavelengths as the optical transport fabric of their future VPNs."

About Astral Point Communications, Inc.

Astral Point Communications, Inc. is a venture-funded telecommunications equipment provider pioneering a new generation of optical access transmission systems. Astral Point's Optical Networking products will allow facilities-based service providers to transition from traditional circuit services to high-performance cell and packet services. Astral Point was founded in 1998 and is located in Chelmsford, MA. For more information on Astral Point, please go to www.astralpoint.com. If you would like to learn more about Astral Point and visit company executives at SUPERCOMM99 in Atlanta from June 6-10, please send an email to [e-mail].